when the lights go down

This week I had the pleasure of reviewing Lawrence Wright’s jaw-dropping new book, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, for Newsday. His nuanced portrait of L. Ron Hubbard, who churned out an impossible number of pulp and science fiction tales before establishing the Church of Scientology in 1954 and eventually becoming the world’s most prolific author, shows that Hubbard’s interest in Hollywood went far beyond plumbing it for disciples and potential celebrity representatives. In the following passages from the book, Wright describes Hubbard’s misadventures in filmmaking.

Hubbard never lost his interest in being a movie director. He wrote innumerable scripts for Scientology training films, but he still thought he could take over Hollywood. He had particularly high hopes for one script, “Revolt in the Stars,” that was based on one of his novels. Inspired by the thunderous success of Star Wars, Hubbard worked on the script in 1979 with the legendary acting teacher Milton Katselas with the aim of having it made into a feature film. …

When Katselas and Hubbard finished the script … Hubbard dispatched one of his top Messengers, Elizabeth Gablehouse, to Hollywood to make a deal. … She shopped the script around and found a buyer willing to offer $10 million—which, at the time, would have been the highest price ever paid for a script, she was told. The Guardian’s Office became suspicious and investigated the buyers, who they learned were Mormons. Hubbard figured that the only reason Mormons would buy it was to put it on the shelf. … The script never did get made into a film.

Meantime, a full-fledged movie studio, the Cine Org, was set up in a barn at Hubbard’s La Quinta hideaway. With his usual brio, Hubbard assumed that he was fully capable of writing, producing, and directing his own matieral, but his novice staff often frustrated him. He would do scenes over and over again, exhausting everyone, but he was rarely satisfied with the outcome. He walked around the set bellowing orders through a bullhorn, sometimes right in the face of a humiliated staff member.

In Paris, I Love You but You're Bringing Me Down, his new memoir about the 18 months he spent working as a copywriter for a French ad agency, Rosecrans Baldwin makes many amusing observations about life in the City of Light. (I mention several of them in my review of the book, which appeared in yesterday's edition of Newsday.) One thing he notices is that every middle-class Parisian aspires to owning a country house, and he finds this urban dream echoed in movie ads underground:

Year-round in Paris, though especially during the summer, posters went up in the Métro for what I called the country-idyll picture. There was Le Coeur des Hommes 2; Trois Amis; Je Déteste les Enfants des Autres. Different films, but the posters were the same: French people in the countryside sitting at a table outdoors. Dipping their legs in a pool. Fishing the river Tarn from a chair. The light would be full of shadows, and nearby was a bottle of rosé, above was the sun—there would be a walnut cutting board and some cornichons. People outdoors laughing, eating, pursuing a kiss. The posters were everywhere, pervasive in all seasons. Down in the Métro, below the drumming rain and the city's dead-end jobs, its bureaucracy and shopping malls, these posters were a reminder that to lose touch with the rustic table was to lose, to some degree, one's French soul.

If I had to stand up in front of students and justify the real-world utility of a Film Studies major, I'd say, "Okay, maybe if you want to be in the industry you can bust your ass and end up as an assistant in the marketing department for Pixar. Maybe you'll even get health insurance. But we're moving into a service economy, and most of you will end up working at Wal-Mart, and the way that Film Studies will be useful to you will be when you try to pick up someone in a bar, you'll have something to talk about, because everybody likes to talk about movies."

Wanye Koestenbaum's new book The Anatomy of Harpo Marx offers, in his words, "a blow-by-blow annotation of Harpo's onscreen actions." It also offers descriptions of Koestenbaum's dreams, reproduced below. (My review of The Anatomy of Harpo Marx, along with M.G. Lord's The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice, appears in this Sunday's edition of Newsday.)

Last night I dreamt that my typewriter's ribbon expatriated from the machine and curled onto the floor. Dreams are evidence I can't omit from my pillow book.

Inappropriate behavior: last night I dreamt that I threw a filthy party. An unwanted guest dropped food on my grand piano's keys and clogged the toilet with mechanical objects—hardware not meant to be flushed down.

In a dream last night I played Harpo on a TV show, my costume a hodgepodge of available scraps. I lingered, waiting to hear my Harpo impersonation's lingering effect on dowager consciousness: a grande dame lived in this liminal TV studio, a Mission-style mansion overlooking not one river but two.

I dreamt I was a yogi, hiking barefoot through marshy and Germanic-sublime terrain reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich paintings: companions disappeared, but clouds compensated.

I dreamt last night that I returned to New Haven and lent my flip-flops, uncomfortable, to a woman who worked the cash register at a sleazy or all-purpose spiritual store, selling ruined trinkets that assisted one's slow movement toward a nirvana beyond the whiplash of change and error.

I dreamt that Barbra Streisand, whose Jewfro in A Star Is Born looks like Harpo's wig, dictated her memoirs while riding in a limo.

I dreamt last night that Caroline Kennedy, at a bookstore, recited a tribute to Jackie Onassis.

A baby boy in my dream last night wrapped his arms around me and said, "Wayne has a fever."

I dreamt last night of kissing—slow-motion, in a vestibule—a half-Dutch, Jewish, photogenic student. He almost refused to recognize me, but I insisted on moist reconnaissance.

I dreamt, last night, of a performance artist, unclothed, discussing nudity. Her vagina behaved as a pointer—a compass, aimed toward my next invention.

I dreamt, last night, of a satisfying Verdi cabaletta, rushing headlong toward revenge and self-aggrandizement.

Dream: my father, in a surprise appearance, whisked me away to a Metropolitan Opera matinee. I had one or two tickets. I didn't understand the difference between one and two; numbers are philosophical problems. We entered a dark storage room, where our bodies pressed together: reciprocal hardness. The incest taboo didn't cow me.

Another dream last night: I rubbed against some off-limits man, perhaps my father, brother, or student, or someone dead. Repeated rubbing turned my groin into a house, church, or bus station: I became a building because I'd illicitly rubbed against a taboo man (Harpo?): the sin of repeated, incremental observation and sampling. Now I remember: I was rubbing against one of my publishers! in a bathhouse! or a men's club, and aquarium, a terrarium. He apologized as he felt up my crotch, in the darkness, with Oulipian persistence. The room's darkness matched his out-of-control stubble, a field of hairs-gone-to-seed, a havoc of misattributions, a fecal intensity of inscriptions—triplicate hieroglyphs. His stubble was failure, not success.

Dreamt I slept with a writing teacher in her country house, Cape Cod or Mexico. Her breasts seemed inflated and artificial. She lay, with Lollobrigida insouciance, near a velvet pillow: the sight of velvet provoked a frozen interregnum sensation connected to air-raid sirens.

Last night I dreamt that Debbie Reynolds confessed to me, "I can't sing, despite my Singin' in the Rain fame."

Dream: I tried to explain the meaning of Heidegger's Da-sein to my students. I said, "God didn't create man. man was there, and he felt invented; he needed to describe his sensation of being-called-into-existence." A skeptical student, who planned to commit suicide tomorrow, scowled.

Last night I dreamt that I gave an A-minus to a Jewish girl, a student with red frizzy hair. She complained: she wanted a straight A. I told her, "Your essays were good, but you said nothing in class, and you befriended troublemakers." I consoled her with the gift of an old cologne bottle, still filled with French scent. (Pour un Homme?)

Dream: Harpo starred in a Yiddish film, a talkie. He spoke! His voice was soft and gravelly. Also dreamt I steamed an artichoke. Moral: I choke on art.

Dream: a woman called me complacent. In my hotel bed, she screwed a dark-haired man, whose Jewishness was undeniable, though domesticated by lawyerliness. I backed off, so she could monopolize.

Dreamt last night I gave a hand job to a literary powerhouse, while we sat, discussing finances, at a fancy Upper East Side restaurant. His dick: knobby.

Dream: I met Barbra Streisand at her home. Blonde, preoccupied, she confused me with another acolyte, a hack writing a book called Barbra in Motion.

In a dream last night I picked up the phone. A nineteenth-century woman on the other end said "Wayne?" I hung up. I didn't want to be recognized.